July 23, 1970

By CLIVE BARNES

ONDON, July 22- The Royal Shakespeare Company presented a glorious failure last night at the Aldwych Theater, the kind of luxury that only a great national theatrical institution can afford.

The play was Günter Grass's "The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising," first given in Germany in 1966, but, apart from student productions at Harvard and Oxford, here having its first English-speaking performances. Odd- for this is a fascinating play. It is also strangely cerebral.

Mr. Grass's intentions are twofold. First he wants to show us the political artist at a moment of crisis. Second- and this intention is more misty- I think he wishes to show that political thought is useless without political action.

His play is based on one historical event, the workers' uprising in East Berlin in June, 1953. There, during the bleakest of conditions, with Walter Ulbricht, the Communist party leader, calling for ever-increased productivity, the workers briefly, and ineffectually, revolted. They marched down the streets shouting slogans; they threatened a general strike. But they had no leaders, no organization and- most importantly- no encouragement from the West.

Soviet tanks moved into Berlin, and it rained and rained and rained. Dampened by the rain, frustrated by the tanks, the would-be revolutionaries went back to their homes. Martial law was declared, and a handful of people were hanged, but East Berlin was soon back to normal. But what if they had a leader, Mr. Grass suggests.

In East Berlin at the time was Bertolt Brecht and his Berliner Ensemble. Mr. Grass's idea is that the Berlin workers should come to Brecht and appeal to him to be their leader, or at least give them guidance. Brecht at the time is working on his famous neo-Marxist version of Shakespeare's "Coriolanus," and sees in the East Berlin uprising important parallels with Shakespeare's play.

What a marvelous dramatic situation Mr. Grass has discovered for himself. Here is Brecht, one of Communism's most famous intellectuals, trying to demonstrate the contemporary relevance in ideological terms of a Shakespeare play and then suddenly finding the play itself erupting into life around, with, yes, himself actually called upon to play the real-life hero.

Here is the portrait of the revolutionary artist as an old man. What does Brecht do? His theater is owned and subsidized by the state. He wants a new revolving stage, he wants to keep his theater open. He considers that. He also considers that whatever happens these are polite, bourgeois revolutionaries who, in true German fashion, will keep off the grass and return to their homes when ordered. He also considers the power of the tanks.

He hesitates. He sits on the fence. He is a moral coward and essentially a failure. A man obsessed with the tape-recording of history rather than the making of it.

The play is patently unfair to Brecht- and Mr. Grass must know this. Indeed Brecht and the ensemble are never mentioned in the play- the Brecht figure is called the Boss, his wife (in life Helen Weigle) is called, after Shakespeare, Volumnia, and, as Mr. Grass is perfectly happy to admit, the play is purely imaginary. On the vital date, June 17, 1953, Brecht was not rehearsing or even preparing his "Coriolanus." Also, so far as I know, Brecht was never asked to take part in the uprising.

Mr. Grass has always been held suspect by the German left for using Brecht in such a cavalier fashion. However, interestingly, Brecht did write a letter- not dissimilar from the letter Grass has the Boss write- to the Government generally condemning the uprising. So perhaps- although the situation is fantasy- Brecht's plight and reaction were not so far removed from what might easily have been a truth.

Mr. Grass's dramatic aspirations unfortunately exceed his dramatic reach. The play- and this is no fault of the Royal Shakespeare Company- is almost more exciting to read about than to see. The interlocking ideas, the plays within plays, the constant confrontation between principles and practice, art and reality: all this holds the attention. But the play itself is not very arrestingly written, and even the Boss with all his tergiversations, is not nearly the engrossing character he should be. His decision to stay in the middle, his rejection of both revolutionaries and government, is never made into a positive choice. Rather, he is seen as an artist who is burned out, reduced to a small repertory of idiosyncratic tricks, and is incapable of work and action.

This is probably not fair to Brecht- but more importantly Mr. Grass is not being fair to himself, for by making his hero a figure of such dry rhetoric, he has lowered the heat of his play beneath blood temperature. At the end you feel a little cheated- all these ideas that Mr. Grass has thrown into the air seem to float down limply, and arguments, so bravely hinted at, are rarely fully examined. Yet it is a play to make you think, and it does have wonderful flashes of dramatic excitement that excuse almost everything.

David Jones's staging cleverly mimics the style of the Berliner Ensemble itself, and is positively brilliant- this is one of the most consciously Brechtian productions seen in London and it dazzles. Of the actors, Emrys James as the Boss is superb. Looking like a mixture of Brecht and Mr. Grass himself, Mr. James struts, pontificates and amuses with a genial cynicism, and best of all he performs that most difficult of stage feats- he suggests the presence of a real genius.